Posts Tagged ‘Gerard Butler’
Tuesday, January 31st, 2023
I guess time flies, because I’ve kind of wanted to see GEOSTORM since it came out, and I didn’t realize that was more than five years ago. It’s the theatrical feature directing debut of Dean Devlin, former writing/producing partner of Roland Emmerich. Devlin wrote the script with Paul Guyot (two season 2 episodes of something called “Felicity”; also Chow Yun Fat’s assistant on THE REPLACEMENT KILLERS).
In my household Mrs. Vern is the fan of disaster movies. The best ones make her giggle. She loves the broad stereotypes, the corny speeches, the cataclysmic destruction, and especially the montages where different countries set aside their differences to save the world together. Unlike me she likes INDEPENDENCE DAY, but she’s not one of the people who considers it to be an actual well made blockbuster movie. She just finds it a little more hilarious and alot less annoying than I do. So she’s the reason we saw and got a kick out of 10,000 B.C. and 2012 in the theater and MOONFALL on video. I skipped THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW and she still gets excited and explains to me what’s happening when we come across it on cable. So although I would like to take credit for reviewing this as part of some post-PLANE Gerard Butler study, it’s really because she spontaneously decided the time had come to watch it, and I agreed it was a good idea.
Butler plays Jake Lawson, the chief architect of a web of climate-controlling satellites built through international cooperation in the futuristic year of 2019. Nicknamed Dutch Boy (a term I really got sick of hearing), the system successfully neutralizes climate-change-exacerbated weather events. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Abbie Cornish, Alexandra Maria Lara, Andy Garcia, Daniel Wu, Danny Cannon, Dean Devlin, disaster movies, Ed Harris, Eugenio Derbez, Gerard Butler, Jerry Bruckheimer, Jim Sturgess, Julia Denton, Laeta Kalogridis, Paul Guyot, Richard Regan Paul, Richard Schiff, Talitha Bateman, Zazie Beetz
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 12 Comments »
Wednesday, January 18th, 2023
PLANE is the new Gerard Butler movie that had the brilliant idea of using a title so goofy that everybody talked about it and it seemed to end up with more awareness than his last three movies combined. Butler (GODS OF EGYPT) plays Brodie Torrance, an airline pilot who’s sent through a storm, his plane gets struck by lightning and loses its power, but he makes a daring emergency landing on an island near the Philippines. Just like SULLY or FLIGHT! Except then it turns into a survival movie (it’s very hot with no air conditioning on the plane, their phones don’t work [but they still make videos for social media], they have no radio to contact anyone) and also this is some kind of ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK type island where there are no ordinary people, only heavily armed terrorist/druglord/warlord/kidnapper militias, who soon arrive to take them hostage.
A movie like this needs some background and set up to get you interested, and PLANE does okay at that. It’s New Year’s Eve, that’s why there aren’t many people on the flight. Brodie is a single father planning to meet up with his daughter (Haleigh Hekking) after the flight. He seems nice, co-pilot Dele (Yoson An, MORTAL ENGINES) is honored to be working with him, and he makes a friendly little let’s-go-get-‘em speech to the flight crew before they begin boarding. One unusual thing about the flight is that prisoner Louis Gaspare (Mike Colter, MILLION DOLLAR BABY, CARTER) is being transported by mountie Officer Knight (Otis Winston, “Street Man,” VENOM: LET THERE BE CARNAGE). He sits in the back and they try to keep everyone from making eye contact. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Charles Cumming, Daniella Pineda, Evan Dane Taylor, Gerard Butler, Haleigh Hekking, J.P. Davis, Jean-Francois Richet, Joey Slotnick, Mike Colter, New Year's Eve, Otis Winston, Paul Ben-Victor, Tony Goldwyn, Yoson An
Posted in Reviews, Action | 18 Comments »
Monday, December 20th, 2021
COPSHOP is the latest smart-alecky, artfully lowbrow violencefest from director Joe Carnahan (rewriting a script credited to Canadian financial advisor Kurt McLeod, story by Mark Williams [HONEST THIEF]). I tend to like Carnahan’s work more than dislike it, and I like that he seems to have settled on Frank Grillo (THE GREY) as his main guy and gotten a little better grip on the collar of that SMOKIN’ ACES chaos he likes to set loose. In both this and last year’s time-loop movie BOSS LEVEL Carnahan has found a good balance between the macho rowdiness, the cleverness and touches of sentimentality, and given Grillo a good sleazy-likable-asshole-antihero-fuckup to play.
I guess he’s more anti and less hero in this one. It’s clearly a modern western, and if it’s THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY he sure ain’t the good. But his main motivation throughout the movie is to warn his ex-wife and daughter that they’re in danger, so how could we completely hate him? He plays Teddy Murretto, a Vegas (or Reno?) fixer on the run with a bag of something valuable. On foot with time running out, enemies closing in and nowhere to go, he punches a random cop so that he can hide out in a jail cell. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alexis Louder, Chad L. Coleman, contemporary western, Frank Grillo, Gerard Butler, Joe Carnahan, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Kurt McLeod, Ryan O'Nan, Toby Huss, Tracey Bonner
Posted in Action, Crime, Reviews | 15 Comments »
Tuesday, December 3rd, 2019
If you enjoy the HAS FALLEN saga, now in its third chapter, you don’t need to read me disrespecting it in this review. I have no quarrel with you. But as much as I appreciate the existence of any ongoing theatrically released rated-R action series in this day and age, I have never achieved a worthwhile level of enjoyment from these fucking things.
What I remember from the first one, OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN, is that the action was messy enough to inspire me to invent the action comprehensibility rating (ACR) system, but there was one part where Melissa Leo defiantly recited the Pledge of Allegiance to terrorists about to execute her, and I liked that. What I remember about the second one, LONDON HAS FALLEN, is that the action scene that people claim was good made no impression on me and I was disgusted by its moronic jingoism and casual murder of civilians (which some tried to convince me was supposed to be sarcastic, but I couldn’t see it).
The first two were location-based premises (the White House is attacked, London is attacked), this one makes the fair assumption that if we’re still watching these we’re okay just following legendarily amazing Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler, DRACULA 2000) whether he goes to a new city that gets attacked or not. “ANGEL” refers to him, a “guardian angel” who has “fallen” by being blamed for an attempted assassination of the president and having to go on one of those old fashioned fugitive runs to prove his innocence. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Gerard Butler, Jada Pinkett Smith, Lance Reddick, Morgan Freeman, Nick Nolte, Piper Perabo, Ric Roman Waugh, Robert Mark Kamen, Tim Blake Nelson
Posted in Action, Reviews | 49 Comments »
Thursday, April 26th, 2018
Have you ever seen a sprawling, nearly 2-hour-plus epic about a gang of bank robbers in Los Angeles, the special police unit trying to bust them, the parallels between the groups that make them as bad as each other and give them a macho bond, the chance public encounters they have in neutral spaces before the robbery, and the absurdly high capacity shootouts they have in broad daylight among the public… but that is only heavily influenced by Michael Mann, not actually directed by him? Oh yeah, it sounds like you saw DEN OF THIEVES too. It was okay though, right?
The thieves are led by ex-Marine Ray Merrimen (Pablo Schreiber, 13 HOURS) – who looks a little like a Christian Bale character, but feels more like Bodhi in the POINT BREAK remake – with goons including Evan Jones (Cheddar Bob from 8 MILE), 50 Cent (Young Caesar from GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN’) and O’Shea Jackson Jr. (Ice Cube from STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON).
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: 50 Cent, bank robbers, Christian Gudegast, Evan Jones, Gerard Butler, Michael Bisping, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Oleg Taktarov, Pablo Schreiber
Posted in Crime, Reviews | 15 Comments »
Monday, March 7th, 2016
LONDON HAS FALLEN is the sequel to 2013’s OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN, that one where Gerard Butler (GODS OF EGYPT) plays Secret Service agent Mike Banning, protecting President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart, I FRANKENSTEIN) when the White House is attacked. It is not to be confused with WHITE HOUSE DOWN, the one where it’s Channing Tatum protecting Jamie Foxx.
Who am I fooling though? I get them confused so much I sincerely mixed up the titles when I wrote the first draft of this review in my notebook, and when I fixed it I started to type OLYMPUS DOWN. I was thinking I’d found the Tatum one to be the more passable 2013 half-assed excuse for a DIE HARD rip-off, but then I went to the tape. My review of that one is a little harsher, and ends by saying “If you see only one UNDER SIEGE IN THE WHITE HOUSE movie this year, see… ah, who gives a shit? Nobody will remember either of these movies a year from now. Of the two I think I preferred OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN. I forget why though. Something about Melissa Leo?”
In my day a movie had to excite somebody’s imagination to get a sequel. Now it just hast to be the one of two similar bad movies that gets more money because it came out first. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aaron Eckhart, Alon Aboutboul, Angela Bassett, Babak Najafi, Gerard Butler, Jackie Earle Haley, Melissa Leo, Morgan Freeman, Radha Mitchell, Robert Forster
Posted in Action, Reviews | 128 Comments »
Friday, March 4th, 2016
Alex Proyas’s new fantasy GODS OF EGYPT debuted at the top of the box office this week, ahead of ZOOTOPIA and DEADPOOL. Only in Russia, though. Here it’s a disastrous flop with merciless reviews.
Honestly this movie was dead the second they released a trailer. I don’t think I ever once saw it discussed in any context other than a criticism of “whitewashing,” since its lead Egyptian gods are played by white Europeans. Obviously a poor choice. Otherwise my take on the trailer was different from the conventional wisdom. I say appealingly weird, you say hahaha razzies haha sobaditsgood howdidthisgetmade haha.
Reading the headlines of the savage reviews, and seeing the weird stills accompanying them, pushed me to not miss it in the theater. At the multiplex here it opened with only two 3D screenings and two 2D each day. By comparison a nearby theater has three each of Stephen Chou’s THE MERMAID, for which Sony has been criticized for having too small of a release. (Sorry, I didn’t see that. I’m an asshole.)
The main thing here is that it’s Alex Proyas. I wasn’t gonna get my hopes up, but I didn’t trust the responses of normal people on a movie by him. Those guys said KNOWING was terrible too, for many of the same reasons I enjoyed it. In fact, his movies wouldn’t be as fun if they didn’t put some people off. They have a little bit of that “how did he get away with this?” appeal.
The good news is GODS OF EGYPT is not as bad as they said. The bad news is it’s not as crazy I’d hoped. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Abbey Lee, Alex Proyas, Brenton Thwaites, Bruce Spence, Burk Sharpless, Chadwick Boseman, Courtney Eaton, Egypt, Elodie Yung, Geoffrey Rush, Gerard Butler, Matt Sazama, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Rufus Sewell
Posted in Fantasy/Swords, Reviews | 126 Comments »
Wednesday, August 14th, 2013
As you know I am a scholar of the Big Summer Popcorn Movie, or whatever you want to call it. And I not only like to review the new ones but I like to look back at the old ones and figure out what’s what. We’re getting to the end of the summer movie season (which I consider to be May through August) but now that I’ve finished The Super-Kumite I think it’s time to start a new summer movie project. Fuck you, September. You don’t scare me.
This is what I’m gonna do. For each summer from 2003 until last year I’m gonna pick two movies to review: one that I never saw before, one that I’m revisiting. And as you can see I’m starting with THE CRADLE OF LIFE as the one I never saw before.
release date: July 25, 2003
It turns out I dig these LARA CROFT TOMB RAIDER movies. Maybe if I’d seen them at the time, on the big screen, as if they were gonna compete with the A-list summer blockbuster type movies, I would’ve been more critical of them. But ignoring them for ten years and then deciding to watch them out of curiosity really pays off I think. Sometimes you gotta let these things age in the cellar for a while. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: adventure, Angelina Jolie, Cieran Hinds, Gerard Butler, Jan de Bont, Simon Yam
Posted in Action, Reviews, Videogame | 44 Comments »
Sunday, March 24th, 2013
OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN is a watchable but instantly forgettable throwback to a subgenre I miss, the glossy ’90s studio action like IN THE LINE OF FIRE and UNDER SIEGE. I mean it’s not a studio movie – it was made by the until-recently-DTV sausage factory Millennium Films – but it sure seems legit with its respectable cast of Aaron Eckhart as the President, Ashley Judd as the First Lady, Academy Award winner Morgan Freeman as the Speaker of the House (a demotion from DEEP IMPACT), Academy Award nominee Angela Bassett as the Secret Service director, Academy Award winner Melissa Leo as the Secretary of Defense, Golden Globe winner Dylan McDermott as… some other type of White House guy. Lending whatever action movie credibility they can muster are 300’s Gerard Butler as the hero, PITCH BLACK’s Radha Mitchell as the hero’s wife, THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS’s Rick Yune as the villain, and PAPARAZZI’s Cole Hauser reprising his A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD role as Agent Who Gets Killed Early On. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aaron Eckhart, Angela Bassett, Antoine Fuqua, Ashley Judd, Cole Hauser, Die Hard on a ____, Dylan McDermott, Gerard Butler, Melissa Leo, Millennium Films, Morgan Freeman, Radha Mitchell, Rick Yune, Robert Forster
Posted in Action, Reviews | 76 Comments »
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
’90s studio action thriller – I’d like you to meet my friend SAW.
LAW ABIDING CITIZEN is the story of a guy named Clyde (Gerard Butler, 300) whose family is killed in a home invasion in the opening scene. To add insult to injury his attorney Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx, STEALTH) makes a deal for one killer to testify against the other and just get one of them executed rather than risk going to trial just based on Clyde’s eye witness testimony. At the time of the attack Clyde was working on a circuit board, so we know he’s some kind of technological wizard or sorcerer, which explains why ten years later he can exact an ingenious master plan of super revenge with strong overtones of cultural critique. You see, he doesn’t just blame the killers, he blames Rice for putting his conviction rate above actual justice, and the judges for whatever they did, this whole system is out of order, you can’t handle the truth, etc. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: F. Gary Gray, Gerard Butler, Jamie Foxx, Kurt Wimmer
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 37 Comments »
